Comments on: Reading in, reading out

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:27:25 +0000

Monica — interesting! I had never heard of that before, but it’s a thought-provoking idea.

By: Monica

Monica — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:14:07 +0000

This makes me think of Peter Elbow, a composition pedagogy scholar who writes about “reading as a believer” and “reading as a doubter.” He thinks that learning to do both is important, as do I.

Frankly, so often I allow my stance to be influenced by honestly extraneous things: my mood, perhaps my feelings about an author or a actor or a genre, but my ideal is to approach everything with the ability to read it as both a believer and a doubter.

By: How I write female characters at SF Novelists

How I write female characters at SF Novelists — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:00:53 +0000

[...] where the women seem like men with a female paint job on top. The reason for that may lie in last month’s post; I’m more likely to process those characters as women who happen to exhibit characteristics [...]

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:24:41 +0000

Hmmm . . . interesting point! For my part, I’d say that I don’t necessarily *like* to do this; it’s usually a response to something that would otherwise kick me out of the story. (Case in point: I hated the treatment of Milady in Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, until I started reading everything said about her through an interpretive lens that is a lot more charitable toward her than the one Dumas provided.)

I haven’t tried IF very much, but I know my off-the-cuff reaction is that I doubt all of the alternatives are equally satisfying — God knows they weren’t back in the days of Choose Your Own Adventure novels, though that’s probably not a good sampling of the type.

By: A.R.Yngve

A.R.Yngve — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:10:32 +0000

Query:
If readers do like to imagine the characters thinking and acting differently from how they are written… then isn’t it odd that interactive fiction (those books where you can choose plot alternatives at certain points) isn’t much more popular?

I’ve been experimenting with writing interactive fiction… but it seems readers tend to be put off when all the choices are actually put before them.

Too much choice, perhaps, or more likely the freedom to choose “breaks the illusion”, like showing the machinery behind the stage…
:-S

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:49:00 +0000

Paul — I keep meaning to read those books, but poor female characters are one of the things that could put me off them.

Phil — oh, heck yeah. I especially ignore the bit in Daniel Keys Moran’s novel The Long Run where Trent gets biosculpture to disguise himself (permanently) as someone else, because I have such a vivid mental image of Trent’s natural appearance that it will not admit any change.

ACameron — you’re right about the passage-of-time thing. I think I can do it better with movies, though, because they don’t require my active attention to keep the story moving forward. If I start quibbling with a book, I stop reading to pay attention to my own thoughts, and maybe I never get back into it again.

By: ACameron

ACameron — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:55:51 +0000

As a reader we are actors in our own stories. What you are doing is exactly right. Rather than allowing the story as written to remain static words on a page you are providing the hundreds of little details that breath life into the story. The hidden beliefs of the characters, the emotions in their voice, the humour or irony in comments that may read stale or sad. This is the same thing that a good actor does as they turn a page of words from a script into a compelling performance. Oddly enough though, I find it easier to do this to a book over a film because with reading I control the passage of time in a way that I can’t effectively do with a movie, (ie read slower vs ?pause button?).

By: Radish

Radish — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:32:03 +0000

Ah. Reading fiction [for me] is like viewing art. I can take away from it only what I bring to the experience.

And that’s typically shaped by where I am in my life at any given moment, by my current needs and wants.

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:35:18 +0000

Interesting post! I’m not as active a reader-in as you seem to be, but I still engage in this pursuit. Mostly I do so with character descriptions. I’ll wilfully ignore the author’s depiction if I settle on something that works better for me. This might be because I’ve latched onto the image of somebody I know from a film, or because I’ve been absently thinking of the heroine as having black hair and then stubbornly refuse to change it when I’m told it’s blonde.

But yes–reading in. How can you not, to some degree?

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:14:26 +0000

I’m a roleplayer who plays, amongst other things, the old niche game Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. based on the novels of the late Roger Zelazny.

Given the time period they were written in, and the strengths and weaknesses of the writer, Zelazny did not do female characters well. Regardless, I and many other players of the game have chosen to interpret the characters (especially the female ones) as written in the novels in new and more complex ways in order to be able to use them in the game.